Secret Sins: (A Standalone)

by CD Reiss

  Secret Sins

  by

  CD Reiss

  Copyright © 2016

  ISBN: 978-1-942833-30-7

  This book is protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America. Any reproduction or other unauthorized use of the material or artwork herein is prohibited.

  This book is a work of fiction. Any similarities to real persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  Cover Art designed by the author

  Thank you to Jean Siska for help

  with legal traditions and terminology.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1.

  Chapter 2.

  Chapter 3.

  Chapter 4.

  Chapter 5.

  Chapter 6.

  Chapter 7.

  Chapter 8.

  Chapter 9.

  Chapter 10.

  Chapter 11.

  Chapter 12.

  Chapter 13.

  Chapter 14.

  Chapter 15.

  Chapter 16.

  Chapter 17.

  Chapter 18.

  Chapter 19.

  Chapter 20.

  Chapter 21.

  Chapter 22.

  Chapter 23.

  Chapter 24.

  Chapter 25.

  Chapter 26.

  Chapter 27.

  Chapter 28.

  Chapter 29.

  Chapter 30.

  Also by CD Reiss

  Title Page Beg

  one

  two

  three

  four

  five

  six

  seven

  eight

  nine

  ten

  eleven

  twelve

  thirteen

  fourteen

  fifteen

  sixteen

  seventeen

  eighteen

  nineteen

  twenty

  twenty-one

  Other Books

  Chapter 1.

  1982

  “How old are you anyway?”

  The guy asking had long strawberry-red hair and wore only shorts and a single sock. He’d tattooed a treble clef on his Adam’s apple that started a symphony of notes all over his chest and abs. His name was Strat, and whenever his shirtless torso showed up in Rock Beat, Lynn went crazy trying to play the song he’d had drawn on his body. It sounded like crap.

  “Eighteen, asshole,” I snarled, letting loose a yard-long cone of cigarette smoke. I stamped out what was left of my cigarette. “You going to call or what?”

  He and Indy snickered. I saw them look at each other over their cards. They thought they had my bra off next. They were wrong. Only two hands beat a full house, and if one of them had a straight flush or four of a kind, I was tits to the rail.

  “I’ll raise you.” Strat tossed a ten in the center of the table.

  We’d been going for four hours already. Indy had met me on the beach and, after a short chat, invited me to play poker. Yoni and Lynn were already in the hotel room for the possibility of a threesome, which was how I’d ended up on the beach alone. But poker? I could do poker.

  My friends hadn’t lasted long. Yoni and Lynn had passed out when they ran out of cash. Keeping up with a couple of cash-rich rockers who didn’t know what to do with their first chunk of advance money was hard.

  Indy/Indiana McCaffrey played guitar for Bullets and Blood. I’d met him on the beach first. I’d stayed cool even though he was completely gorgeous and charming, but when Strat came into the hotel suite, I almost had a coronary. I was a huge fan. I’d played their debut album, Kentucky Killer, for two weeks straight until Dad took my cassette. Took the Walkman too. I bought another of each but hid them.

  “Call,” I said, tossing in my ten.

  Indy threw down his cards. “Y’all are too rich for me.”

  Indy had sun-kissed brown hair and a ginger beard. He was down to his skivs and a bandana around his neck, toned and tan from head to toe. I’d taken all of his money, and Strat and I had been pretty equally matched. Now I was going to break him.

  “Too rich and too young,” Strat said, popping a peanut.

  Lynn coughed on the couch. Stretched.

  God, please don’t let her puke.

  “I told you. I’m eighteen.”

  I don’t know if I mentioned this. I wasn’t eighteen. I won’t say if I was younger or older. You can go figure it out.

  Strat laughed. “Flygirl…”

  Flygirl was a pretty common way to address a girl in the eighties, crossing race and geography, but I still felt as if it made me attractive to him. Strat chewed his peanut as if it had the mass of a pack of gum, chin up, looking at me in my bra. I felt naked.

  I was naked, but I hadn’t felt like it until his eyes swung around the curves of my body. I wanted to tell him to go fuck himself, but he finished before I could get a mental jacket on.

  “You got a mouth like an old lady,” Strat said.

  His stare froze me in place. The backs of my thighs got sticky on the pleather.

  “Never heard a girl talk like you.”

  Green was the rarest eye color, and his looked like precious Chinese jade.

  He was so hot.

  A hot rock star.

  I put my cards down, snapping each one in the fan as I laid them out. “Aces full of sevens. You got anything in your hand besides your dick?”

  Indy whooped. “She’s got you, Stratty-boy. The pot and… what do you have left? Pants and a sock, bro. Go for the sock.”

  Indy was an amateur. He was beautiful and brilliant, but he didn’t act twenty. He acted like the guys my own age.

  Eighteen.

  Or whatever.

  Strat hadn’t taken his eyes off me. Hadn’t even glanced at my full house. Didn’t even look down when he laid his cards on the table. I couldn’t move for too many seconds. His look wasn’t a look. It was a black hole. All gravity.

  I tore myself from his gaze and looked at his cards.

  Four deuces.

  Fuck.

  Losing to deuces was insulting.

  Strat leaned back, the coils of his song all over his ripped body. The pot was his, but he didn’t reach for it. He just worked me over with his eyes, arm over the back of his chair, knees apart, daring me to search for the bulge in his shorts. I breathed deeply but couldn’t get enough air. My lungs had shrunk.

  Indy looked at me under the table. “No socks, man. Shit. You’re down to not too much.”

  I was in over my head. Way fucking over. Yet I liked it. More than liked it, I was comfortable when I was out of my depth. All the moving pieces, the inconsistency of the cards, the mess I was making excited and soothed me, a contradiction that translated into belonging.

  I could fix it. I fixed it every time. My grades were amazing. I was the liaison for the Suffragette Society. I ran the school stage crew like a military operation. It was too easy. If you wanted an omelet, you had to break some eggs.

  I’m not saying I chased musicians around after the sun went down because I sat on the edge of my bed and decided to make a mess of my life in order to fix it back up. Insight like that is no more than Monday morning quarterbacking.

  I stood and put my hands behind my back, reaching between shoulder blades.

  Strat licked his lips, taking his eyes from my crotch and leveling them on mine. I looked right at the motherfucker and pinched my bra hook. He was going to see my tits. The nipples were already hard from his attention. I had pretty good odds on a little damp spot where my panties had been on the pleather.

  “Why don’t you stop for a minute there?” he said.

 
; I stopped. I didn’t have to. Rules were rules. The bra came off. But he was effectively changing them.

  Also, I didn’t want to take my bra off.

  Strat leaned forward a little. A blade of copper hair slid off his shoulder and swung in front of his cheek.

  “What?” I asked. “Scared of a little tit?”

  “Who are you?” he asked.

  “Cinnamon.” I flicked my head a little, and my own red hair got out of my eyes. “But you can call me Cin.”

  “Yeah. No. You got backstage last week from the admin office. I know you didn’t fuck Herve Lundren to get there either. Then you and your friend show up places you shouldn’t be. The loading dock behind the Wiltern. The thousand-dollar-a-plate dinner at Vilma. And Indiana here fucking stupids right into you.”

  “Stupid’s not a verb, asshole,” Indy said.

  Strat didn’t get distracted. Indy could have broken into the “Star-Spangled Banner” and it wouldn’t have snapped the drum of energy between Strat and me.

  “Cinnamon’s not even a name,” Strat added.

  “Your mother name you Strat?”

  “Rolling Stone revealed my name three months ago.”

  “Stratford Gilliam,” I whispered.

  He leaned back again, but he didn’t spread out. He crossed an ankle over a knee. “Something’s up. You have cash. Enough to play with us. No eighteen-year-old has a wad of twenties inside hundreds.”

  “I’m a fan. I like your music.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “You deaf? Cinnamon.”

  “I can call you Cin.”

  I touched my nose.

  “Tell me your name,” he said, “and you can keep the bra on.”

  He’d read me like a street sign. I didn’t want to take that bra off. I wasn’t ready for what that would lead to.

  Yet I’d wanted to see if I could get out of it.

  Dad asked me once why I loved trouble. Why I seemed to enjoy it so much. Why I made my own if I couldn’t find it in the wild. I had no answer. Still didn’t.

  I didn’t want it to get out that I was in a hotel suite with Bullets and Blood. If I told this guy my name, I could get into trouble, and not the enjoyable kind.

  “Your name.” The word name was silent on his lips.

  My hesitation didn’t seem to bother him. He played me at the right tempo, continuing when I thought I’d break and just snap my bra open.

  “I’ve seen enough tits in my time,” he said. “But you. Maybe you’re a fan, but it’s something else. You’re different.”

  Show him your tits.

  My fingers twitched on my sides. I was throbbing everywhere. My body wanted him, and my mind was running a four-minute mile in the other direction. I’d lost control of the situation, and as much as I dabbled in trouble, I never lost control of it.

  Lock it down. Don’t even think your name. Don’t even think it. Don’t even.

  “What’s your name?” he asked again.

  I swallowed and decided to take off my bra. He’d try to fuck me, and we’d see where that went. I’d fought off men before. My hands crawled to my lower back.

  He blinked, and in that split second his jade eyes were hidden from me, I changed course.

  “Margaret Drazen,” I said, putting my hands on my hips and leaning hard on one foot. “You can call me Margie.”

  “Nice to meet you, Margie.” He lazily picked up the deck of cards. “Your deal.”

  Chapter 2.

  Five things about being me.

  1) I come from a long line of money. I’ve got more money in my trust than most people see in a lifetime. I’ve never worried about having it or getting it. I don’t have to work, but I like to. Really like to.

  2) I’m connected. If I don’t know who I need to know, my father does. I’ve never had much cause to call in favors or know the right people, except to get into concerts and parties when I was younger. But I can. And knowing that makes all the difference.

  3) I grew up quickly. I was born mature. Strat had it right when he said I talked like an old lady. He said that before I was fed shit on sterling silver spoon, then the talk got real and I saw life for what it was. So the politics and backstabbing in law school were child’s play. Intra-office bickering is white noise. I win. End.

  4) Bullshit makes me really impatient, and drama is bullshit. Drama’s never about right and wrong. It’s about feelings.

  5) Feelings are for children. See #3.

  Chapter 3.

  1994

  Law offices are snake dens. I learned that at Stanford when I butted up against the old boy network for an internship at Whalen + Mardigian. But I didn’t bitch about the partners inviting the guys to a strip club and pulling interns from the group there, because I had the luxury of my own privilege. I felt bad for the women who didn’t have my smorgasbord of options, but see… that was a feeling. See Chap. 2 - No.5

  So I clerked at Thoze & Jensen, a multinational firm with twelve offices in the States and an impressive presence overseas. Tokyo. Frankfurt. Dublin. Johannesburg. Hong Kong. But the firm was still as backward as a third-world country. An impenetrable fortress for anyone outside the Harvard/Princeton/Yale Testosterone Mafia, meaning—women. All women, with or without Ivy League degree. We could clerk and we could be associates, but we’d never partner.

  We’d see about that.

  They hired me as an associate right out of law school but I had to clerk until I passed the bar. Until then, I got a six-figure salary even though I didn’t need it.

  How?

  Easy. I brought them a client.

  You thought it was going to be some scandal.

  It could have been, but when choosing between sugar and vinegar, it’s best to remember vinegar is most effective as a preservative.

  I was a clerk until I passed my bar, and despite what you may think, I couldn’t buy that. Nor did I want to. I rented a house in Culver City and covered it in sticky notes. From the table where I kept my keys, (Strickland v. Washington. Test for ineffective assistance of counsel. Performance objectively unreasonable. Reasonable performance would have gotten a different result) to the bathroom mirror (Ford v. Wainwright. No death penalty for mentally deficient). Even my car had a note stuck to the windshield (TORTS – Tarasoff v. Regents. Responsibility of psychiatrist to warn potential victims of harm. Responsibility can be litigated with commensurate award for damages.)

  I didn’t have time for men or friends. No one understood me anyway. No one but my family, which was more than enough. I had six sisters and a brother. I was the oldest, and I’m still not telling you my age, or you’ll start doing math in your head instead of paying attention.

  I was heading for a meeting with the senior partner on a copyright case I’d just been put on, rushing through the waiting room, which was a shortcut to the conference room, with an armload of depositions and pleadings, rattling hearsay exceptions in my head. There were ten categories, and I always forgot one. I walked across past the white leather couches with my folder, feet silent on the grey carpet.

  Excited utterances.

  Dying declarations.

  Declarations against interest.

  Present sense impression.

  Present state of mind.

  Doing good. Almost there…

  Prior inconsistencies.

  Public records.

  Business records exception.

  Ancient documents.

  And….

  And I beat my brain for the last one.

  The man pushed himself off a couch as I was looking in my head for the tenth exception instead of out of my eyes for tall guys in suits.

  I was midair, shouting, “Family records!” as if getting backed into reminded me that families couldn’t be trusted to keep a story straight. The folder I was delivering to the conference room went flying. A shoe fell off. I landed on my butt bone with my legs spread as far as the pencil skirt allowed.

  “Oh, shit, I’m so sorry!”<
br />
  I put my knees together and got back up on my elbows to get a look at the clod who had knocked into me.

  He was a god. The kind of guy who could model but didn’t because it was too boring. Clean-shaven with brown hair pushed to one side. A bottom lip that had the same fullness as the top. Blue eyes. I had a metaphor for the color tooling around somewhere in the torts and procedures, but it all went blank when he put his hand down to help me up, and I saw a tattoo creep from under his cuff.

  I looked at him again.

  He looked at me.

  “Cinnamon,” he said.

  “You can call me Cin.” The words came automatically, as if coded in my myelin.

  I took his hand, and he helped me up. My response might have sounded smooth and mature, as though I wasn’t thrown off at all, but it was the opposite. I’d memorized that answer sober, drunk, and dancing. I even said it in my head when someone mentioned the spice. Back when I was a stupid, reckless, wicked girl, it was a calling card.

  I got up, not making eye contact with the stares coming from the entire waiting room.

  “I’m fine,” I said, acting meek. When all the clients returned to staring at their magazines, I turned to the man who had knocked me down. “You going to stand there and let them trample my case file, Indiana McCaffrey?”

  I smiled a little, and he smiled back. Wow. Had I been so unconscious when I met him that I’d thought he was only okay-looking? A close second to Stratford Gilliam? Seriously? How had he matured from twenty into this perfectly-chiseled version of a man?

  I bent down to get my papers, and he put his hand on my shoulder.

  “Let me be the first to get on my knees,” he said, crouching before I could respond.

  I couldn’t believe he remembered me out of the thousands of girls who had thrown themselves at him. I knelt next to him and scooped up papers.

  “I go by Drew now,” he whispered. “My middle name.”

  “I go by Margie. My real name.”

  “I remember.”

  “I didn’t expect you to,” I said quietly.

  He tilted his head just enough to see me, then he went back to picking up the files. I could see the tiny holes in his ears where he’d let his piercings close up.

  “Who could forget you?” he said.

  “Oh, please. Flattery only soils the intentions of the flatterer.”